Sunday, 1 May 2016

Miracle healing - the apothecary of God.

Miracle healing has always held me spellbound. But most times, things
are not as simple as they appear to be. They say God works in mysterious ways
and divine healing takes the cake here. If you read the literature and the
testimonies, you will notice that believers don’t always serve an obvious God
when it comes to healing. It is just not that cut and dry.

But why is God unobvious? Because you
seldom get a straight answer about the healing process. Joyce Meyer once wrote
that “God’s 3 answers to your prayers are “Yes”,
“Not yet” and “I have something better in mind””. My only bugbear here is that
while “yes” is what the petitioner earnestly
seeks after, the other two answers often muddle up causation with correlation.

I have seen this with my own eyes. I came from a Church that holds
miracle services every weekend and trust me, it’s not easy to get a proper medical
certification of the cause(s) of the healing. Most of them will tell you that
they are 70 to 90 per cent healed and that was it. And please don’t ask me how they came up with that percentage. Some
have come forward to tell the eager crowd that they’d experienced some relief
from migraine and backaches. But those relief so called are hardly verifiable. In
other words, anything short of an outright “yes”
on stage runs the risk of making the miracle less of a miracle.

Still, some will testify a month or two later that the medical results
came back showing a shrinking or a disappeared growth, but you just can’t be
sure about its causes. It could very well be attributed to subsequent surgery,
medication and/or rehabilitation, and not so much the laying of hands. But of
course, faith and positive confession will invariably claim full credit for all
healings – whether verified or otherwise. God
is sovereign remember.

As such, in my view, the correlation are often mixed up with
causation and attribution are entangled with self-confirmation. And the secular
weasel scurrying up the miracle healing pants is that dreaded placebo effect or
that psychosomatic mind-body healing that makes the testimonies appear more
natural than supernatural.

At this point, some may accuse me of splitting hair over this whole
miracle manifestation. They may say that as long as one receives his or her
healing – whether it is a month or a year later – does the exact cause really matter?
Well, it matters to me because Jesus somehow works miracles on the spot. In
other words, we should call a spade a spade and if it feels like a miracle,
heals like a miracle and gets up and walk like a miracle, then it is a miracle
– anything short of that is just not. I am not playing with semantics here. I
am just serving it up plain, simple and direct.

For this reason, what is badly needed on stage is the appropriate medical
diagnostic devices to verify each case. However, this would be impractical and
time-consuming. You see, those being prayed for are quickly ushered up to the
stage, and under the glare of the unanimous public faith, they are asked leading
questions to confirm the miracle. One by one, the conclusion is very much foregone.
It is either instantaneous healing or progressive healing, and the latter forms
the majority of the healing testimonies. Recall
the arbitrary percentage of healing – 70 to 90%?And progressive healing
further complicates the hunt for the main causal link. Recall that I am not playing with semantics here.

After the on-stage testimony, they are ushered back to their seat and
their testimony recorded. It is therefore based on nothing more than word of
mouth. Even if the healing is not obvious, the bias always is. Being candid is just
not the preferred policy for a typical healing service. The unspoken rule is
that anything that points to doubt should be kept at bay.

You will therefore not hear a testimony about unanswered prayer on
stage. That would put a damper on the flow of healing testimonies. Just as the
half-baked healed cases are rushed up the stage, the confirmed unhealed cases are
quietly send off the stage. So, like Gold
90.5FM, you only hear the good stuff. You
just can’t find a better PR manager for God.

Come to think of it, I guess the Catholic Church has the best
anti-placebo-effect proof to separate the true
miracle wheat from the psychosomatic
chaff. The Vatican takes their miracles very seriously. The claimants go
through a battery of tests via qualified medical experts and it may take months
to confirm (or disconfirm) just one case (while in my former Church, most
confirmation take no more than 5 minutes).

In fact, in a small town in France, Lourdes, a 14-year-old girl in
1858 claimed that she saw visions of the Virgin Mary. Since then, more than
five million people have come to Lourdes to look for spiritual and physical
healings. All the so-called miracles have been collected by a committee of
physicians who would appoint qualified personnel to investigate each case.

Todate, more than 70,000 people have reported themselves cured and 69
of them have been stamped as miracles. This is no easy feat mind you. The
process of verification is rigorous and uncompromising. Three tough questions
confront each case: Is the healing
immediate? Is the healing complete? And is the healing permanent? For the
latter (that is, is it permanent?), it might just take years of follow-up medical
examination to confirm the miracle. And
they all have the Virgin Mary to thank!

But that’s not all. There is just no lack of “miraculous healings” in this strange secular world. Earlier, I
mentioned the placebo effect and this is akin to self-healing. As such, God is
not the only one who is working in mysterious ways. Our mind too has her own
mysteries and part of that mystery is to self-heal.

Medical science has in fact proven the effectiveness of the placebo
effect in many studies. The magic seems to be in the suggestibility of the patients
together with the context by which the bogus medical procedure is being carried
out. The more credible or believable the surgical set up – with doctors wearing their signature white coat and a stethoscope
around their neck - the more the patient will respond positively to what
he/she is told. This self-fulfilling tendency in us is what conflates
self-healing and miracle healing.

We are indeed psychological or symbolic creatures when it comes to
self-healing. You can give fake pills to Parkinson’s patients, and if they do
not doubt that they are fake, they somehow get better. Saline solution disguised as painkiller have been injected into
patient to ease their pain and it actually worked as well as oral analgesics. There
is even a discredited process called vertebroplasty where a small
inconsequential quantity of cement is injected into the fractured bone on the
pretense of strengthening it. After the procedure, some patients actually
reported that they felt better. One of them even went back to golfing without
experiencing any pain.

In fact, this whole placebo-effect phenomenon gets even stranger. Our
mind is just too eager to please. Even when the patients are told that what
they are receiving is nothing more than saline solution or fake pills, yet as
long as it is administered by a doctor and carried out in the context similar
to a hospital room, they reported feeling better. Some were even healed for
good. Go figure.

Somehow, a belief, an expectation or an anticipation can change the
brain by rewiring it in a way that facilitate some form of healing or temporary
relief. The brain can therefore produce its own painkiller or neuro-drugs to
ease the pain or hasten the healing process when the patient conditions it to
produce the needed neurotransmitter. In other words, the brain seems to be its
own pharmacy or medical dispensary.

Of course, the limitation of placebo effect relief is that it cannot grow
you a leg after it has been amputated or raise the dead because you can’t
suggest anything to a corpse. They tend not to respond to you. And if you suffer
from a serious infection, a life-threatening allergic reaction from imbibing
peanut butter, or if you were bitten by a poisonous snake, it would probably
make infinitely better sense to seek immediate medical intervention rather than
to repeatedly condition your mind to kick into some salubrious action.

In Proverbs 23:7, it reads: “As
a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” I guess atheists may be tempted to apply
that verse as the mantra for self-healing. By that same logic, the cure is
therefore inherent in the confidence and the confidence is evidenced in the
belief and the belief is nurtured by regular and consistent suggestion –
whether through external or internal stimulation, or a mixture of both.

So, I am back to the miracle healing in my former Church. I recall I once
asked a pastor to explain self-healing to me. I asked him for his view about
people who claim to be healed from or via homeopathy, transcendent meditation,
auto-suggestion, fake pills, a strict regime of watching comedy movies (no joke, Norman Cousins was healed from just
doing that), and invoking the curative powers of angels, Greek mythological
creatures and revered Catholic saints.

The pastor’s reply was this, “God
works in mysterious ways, even in self-healing because he has created us that
way.”

Well, I can’t say that I am totally convinced by that explanation.
But whether it is placebo effect or divine intervention, I guess for many
believers a miracle is a matter of interpretation. And attributing it to the
all-sovereign one who had created the universe, or the multi-universes, appears
to be the safest position for the believers to take when dealing with
this inscrutable mystery that is called miracle healing. At times, we may just
have to call a spade something else then. Cheerz.

1 comment:

I often asked:When is it Healing?When is it a Miracle?When is it a spiritual healing and when is it a spiritual miracle?I just wonder! Why? Because when someone gets healed, that someone thanks the Doctor or Jesus or Both or himself? When a real disaster happens and someone gets out of this disaster without being hurt, is it a miracle or is it that a person is simply at the right place and at the right time with the right conditions?